So, hi. I'm the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn't answer my requests to regain it, although I can't say I blame them. They're probably scared I'll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.

I'm lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They've since been changed, don't worry.)

Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)

That's about all I have to say for now.

- Updated: 8/27/17, 10:55 PM EST -

Because I've received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I'll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I'm not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it's not Tara.

- Final Update: 8/31/17, 10:38 PM EST -

This is going to be my final update. I'm getting way too many PMs to answer them all individually. A lot of people are asking why I waited until this month to say anything, so I'll try to address that.

I registered for FanFiction.net on February 28th, 2006. Yes, I know the profile says March 1st. The profile is wrong. It was February 28th, because my best friend had just turned fifteen. I'm not likely to forget her birthday. (For anyone wondering, My Immortal was uploaded on March 3rd.) I registered for FictionPress on March 31. I never uploaded anything on FP, which is probably why hackers never got around to hijacking it: They didn't know it existed. Unfortunately, I forgot it existed, too. I only remembered this site a few weeks ago when I was talking with my agent and my editor about My Immortal's weird internet legacy.

I signed into FP after so long for three reasons. The first is the most obvious: My FF profile is no longer accessible. It was hacked almost a decade ago. I knew the girls who hacked us the first time--they were two girls from the Philippines with whom Raven and I were constantly fighting on the forums, and they were just trying to mess with us--but I don't know who did it the final time, although I have my suspicions. FF.net seems to be a body without a head right now, because staff doesn't answer any of my emails. They didn't answer emails a decade ago, either. If you know how to get in contact with Xing Li, let me know. I can easily prove I'm who I say I am if he'll give me the time of day. The second reason for logging into this dusty old account: I wanted to leave a thank you note to My Immortal's readers. Really. That's it. Because I really am beyond grateful that you've kept it alive for so long, even without me. And the third reason I updated, and possibly the silliest: Ugh...Lani Sarem. I am a massive fan of The Hate U Give, which I consider an incredibly important literary work. Sarem trying to scam it out of its spot on the NYT literary list left me feeling sick to my stomach. When I received a couple of messages here asking me if I was Sarem, even though they were probably in jest, I felt a kneejerk reaction to shoot them down. Authors work really fricking hard to get their stories told. Sarem breezing through the process wasn't just an insult to Angie Thomas and the political climate that necessitated her work. It was an insult to the kind women I'm privileged to work with.

So, that's it. It doesn't seem like there's anything more I can say on the topic. Not right now.

Love one another and help one another. We can't navigate this world without each other.

There have been thousands of "I'm totally the my immortal author!!!1one" accounts resurfacing over the years but this is the only one that not only actually possesses a shred of credibility, but also actually sounds like it was written by someone who was a 13-year-old on livejournal a decade ago and has grown up since then. I see no reason to doubt this one considering it's the only one that actually reads like it could have been written by her, on an account as old as it is nonetheless.